Although it appears that Americans vote directly for their president and vice president, in reality they don’t. It’s the US Electoral College that does the picking. It’s not an educational institution but a slicing, dicing, and mincing vote processor.

So, even though Kamala Harris deep-fried Donald Trump during their debate, and even if she wins the national popular vote, she could still lose to the orange convicted felon. 

In fact, historically, five US presidents lost the popular vote but won the election, thanks to the Electoral College: John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. 

Here’s how it rolls. The US Constitution gives every US state (and the District of Columbia) the power to select a number of electors equal to the number of its Senators and Representatives in Congress. In all, the Electoral College has 538 members. 

The winner of the popular vote in a state gets all of that state’s Electoral College votes. (Nebraska and Maine split theirs between the popular vote winner in the state and the popular vote winner in each congressional district, adding another layer of processing of the popular vote.) A simple majority of the electors’ votes, at least 270, decides who wins the presidency and vice presidency.

This means the result of the national election could depend on a few thousand votes in a few “battleground” or “swing” states. This year Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin hold the key to the White House. 

The process gives a mere handful of states too much weight in deciding the presidency. That’s why on January 6, 2020 loser Trump attempted to overturn the election result by just trying to make Congress trash electoral college votes from just a few states. 

And that’s why, Harris could eat Trump for lunch nationally in this November’s voting, have him for seconds and dessert, yet still lose to him.

Controversial history

How and why did this convoluted electoral system in the so-called center of Free World come about? 

The “Founding Fathers” who had just won independence from the British didn’t want to be ruled by another despotic king. Some of them feared the vote of an “uninformed mob” and wanted Congress to pick the president. But others afraid of back-door horse trading preferred a direct nationwide popular vote. 

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Reaching a compromise, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 created the Electoral College to pick the president, empowering state legislatures to assign electors to that that body. 

But how many electors should each state have? It was the same issue the Framers faced in deciding the population-based distribution of seats in the House of Representatives. 

The matter of slavery

In counting a state’s population in the late 1700s, should Southern states include enslaved Blacks who could not vote and made up about a third of the South’s demographic? Free whites certainly did not want the allotment of Electoral College seats to be limited to their number, since enslaved blacks were considered property, not people.

So the Constitutional Convention applied the “three-fifths compromise,” which had been adopted in apportioning House seats: three out of every five enslaved Blacks were counted as part of the total population in determining the number of Electoral College members in the South. This apportionment gave Southern slave states unfair electoral advantage, until the Civil War ended it. 

Controversy has dogged the Electoral College ever since its establishment, including an unwritten elector deal in 1877 that made Rutherford B. Hayes president in exchange for the removal of federal troops protecting Blacks in the South, effectively ending post-Civil War Reconstruction that had given equal rights to formerly enslaved Blacks. Ku Klux Klan violence surged and racist Jim Crow laws would persist until the 1960s.

Obsolete

Mistrust of the Electoral College has risen over the years such that today “more than six-in-ten Americans (63%) would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally,” according to a Pew Research.

But eliminating the Electoral College is easier wished for than done. It would require amending the U.S. Constitution, and the Framers wanted the amendment process to be long and complicated, thinking it would ensure national stability.

Ironically, the Electoral College could instead spell existential political instability this November should it decide in favor of Donald Trump and his supporters’ wish to gut the core of U.S. democracy. – Rappler.com

Rene Ciria Cruz is an editor at positivelyfilipino.com. He edited the book A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), (UP Press), and was Inquirer.net’s US Bureau Chief 2013-2023. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific News Service, and California Lawyer Magazine.